


Wide Awake

by GingerBreton



Series: Then I Met You [3]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Banter, F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Pre-Relationship, Reminiscing, Star Gazing, Tumblr Prompt, this is pure fluff guys don't @ me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25318837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerBreton/pseuds/GingerBreton
Summary: "It's quiet out here... too quiet" might be fun to say, but when it's 2am and quiet as hell in Sanctuary, sometimes it's just boring.A sleepless MacCready pays a visit to the only other person who might still be awake.
Relationships: Robert Joseph MacCready/Female Sole Survivor
Series: Then I Met You [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1813063
Comments: 17
Kudos: 36





	Wide Awake

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr fluff prompt: “What are you doing here? It’s late.”

MacCready couldn’t sleep. Lay in his darkened room, he huffed out a sigh – cigarette smoke mingled with condensation in the cold air. A cursory glance at his watch told him it was pushing 2 am. 

What felt like too many hours ago, he’d found a spot in one of Sanctuary’s many unoccupied houses and bedded down on a mattress that seemed to be more springs than anything else, but it would do. He’d slept on worse. 

Not that sleep seemed to be on the cards. 

Nah, the mattress wasn’t the problem. He just couldn’t settle properly the first night back in ‘civilisation’ after weeks on the road. His nerves were still on edge. He’d barely undressed for bed, only shedding his coat, hat and kicking off his boots. His rifle lay at hand by the mattress, ready for what still felt like the imminent possibility of attack. He’d studied the ceiling until his candle burnt down, then lay in the darkness, not even able to blame his usual turn on first watch for keeping him awake—they’d be well into Ivy’s shift by now. 

Not that she’d be awake. She’d be enjoying a quiet night’s sleep, some space to herself and no monsters ready to jump out of the shadows.

_ Just whatever prowls the dark places in her head. _

MacCready shook the thought from his mind; it wasn’t any of his business where his partner went in those glassy-eyed moments when the colour left her cheeks and she looked like she was watching something so real she could reach out and touch it. Something he had no idea how to even begin looking for. All he could do was watch her back if it happened again. 

Instead, he busied himself fidgeting with a fresh pack of cigarettes— _ ‘fresh’ 200 years ago anyway _ —unable to decide whether he should just lie there and light another or get up and stretch his legs in the hope that the cold night air would either wake him up fully or put him to sleep. 

Whatever he chose, he needed to decide soon because the boredom was driving him nuts. 

He sat up, suspiciously eyeing the sliver of moonless sky he could see through a hole in the unpatched roof above him. For a boy who grew up in a cave, darkness made him twitchy (not that Lamplight was a dark place, the clue was in the damn name). The thing he’d come to realise about the dark and the quiet was, if you didn’t know any better, it could too easily be mistaken for calm and safe. Once,  _ just once _ , he’d let himself be taken in by it. And he’d have to live with that for the rest of his days. 

These days, not that MacCready would ever admit it, he liked it better if there was just that little bit of light to creep past his eyelids as he drifted off, and maybe a bit of noise too, some sort of show that there was life around him; campfires, candles, even the tinny echo of Ivy’s pipboy broadcasting that jackass, Travis, at all hours would do the trick. 

This quiet wouldn’t do at all. Too few distractions. Too much time to think. 

Finally freeing a cigarette, he fumbled for his lighter in the darkness, flicked it a few times to no avail. A cursory shake confirmed it—empty. He tossed it aside, tucked the cigarette back into the pack and reached for his boots instead. 

_ A walk it was. _

* * *

The damn door creaked. 

MacCready cursed himself for using it instead of the other one, which didn’t even technically have a door in it anymore.  _ Idiot. _ He’d seen a glow through the window and hadn’t even thought. He’d just walked straight in. 

Ivy’s house (the one she’d adopted, anyway) wasn’t like the one he’d chosen to hide away in. It didn’t smell like damp or have holes in the roof. Someone had gone to great effort to get it back to being homely. It still smelled like supper from that evening, leftover veg stew, and the vague scent of-MacCready sniffed-was that carrot flowers? Probably had something to do with that fussy old woman of a Mr Handy unit. He was undoubtedly why there was also a lingering smell of disinfectant.

Ivy had told him that it had stayed there cleaning its old masters’ house for  _ two hundred years _ . What a loser. 

From the meagre moonlight he could just make out the dark shapes of the kitchen counters ( _ there _ was the vase of flowers the robot must have decided to put out while playing house in honor of his new mistress’s return home), the rickety dining table they’d decided not to eat their supper at, and the couch that, on the one occasion he’d been stupid enough to throw himself onto it, turned out to be even more uncomfortable than the one in their usual room at the Dugout. 

The faint welcoming glow of lantern light from the hallway to the bedrooms almost made him forget his midnight trespassing. He meandered forward – fully intending to announce his arrival– only to boot a water bowl right across the room. He dived forward trying to put an end to the metallic ringing and sloshing, but too late.

“Who’s there?”

Mac knew Ivy well enough to hear the edge of panic behind the warning in that shout. He clamped his hands onto the bowl, finally stopping it rolling, and looked up from his spot knelt in a puddle of dog water. 

Ivy darted out from the farthest room, the one where the warm light spilled from, oh, and now he felt bad _. _ She was dressed for bed in the over-large plaid shirt she’d picked up from some trader in Diamond City; something more comfortable to sleep in that her vault suit, she’d said - it hadn’t seen much use, given the amount of time they spent staying in places where it was safer to stay as armoured as possible, even when trying to get a night’s rest. Her hair was all over the place, like she’d been tossing and turning, trying to get settled as badly as he had. Frankly, she looked exhausted. 

But only a real dumbass would tell her that right now, because the startled woman, whose house he’d walked into at 2am was currently levelling a pistol straight at his head. 

“Woah woah woah! Angel, it’s just me!” MacCready stuck his hands up in the air, giving her a startled grin. He may be used to being on the end of the  _ threat _ of her pistol—he couldn’t help having a smart mouth—but the actual pistol… that was new. “Is this a hold-up? You want me to hand over my caps?”

Ivy dropped the gun to her side with a muttered curse and flopped back against her doorframe. 

“ _ Mac? _ What are you doing here? It’s late.” Rocking her head back, she let out a shaky breath. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He shrugged apologetically from his spot on the floor, avoiding her question long enough for her to wander forward offering her free hand.

“You can get off the floor now, tiger,” she said with a sigh that edged into a smirk. “Like I could get any caps out of you anyway. Gunpoint or not.”

Now  _ banter _ he could handle. It was one of his favourite things about her, she enjoyed his teasing and his joking, she even put up with his snarking. Plus, she’d offered him the perfect get out of jail free card to avoid any explanations about why he was there. 

He let his gaze flick down the bare legs he was currently eye-to-thigh with, and back up to Ivy’s face, giving her an excessively dramatic eye roll. 

“If you’re trying to impress me, it’s not going to work,” he drawled.

She withdrew her hand with a mock scowl and gave him a sharp, but not painful, kick—enough to send him from kneeling to sitting in the puddle of dog water—turned on her heel and wandered back up the hall to her room. With maybe a little more sway to her hips than was entirely necessary. 

It was probably safer  _ not _ to call her on it though, she was still armed, after all. Best just to stay put, watch maybe...

“I  _ was _ in bed, thank you very much. There were blankets and everything.” She snarked back over her shoulder at him, finally giving a cursory glance as she reached her room before disappearing out of view. “I was just drifting off when I heard this absolute racket. And I thought to myself, it’s not Christmas for a few more weeks, so it can’t be Santa. Not that he doesn’t owe me 210 years’ worth of presents…”

_ And people thought he was the sarcastic one. _

MacCready grinned, getting up quickly and bounding after her up the hall. 

He was careful to avoid looking into the darkened nursery as he passed. His first time in Sanctuary he’d found Ivy staring into the room. She’d asked him if he thought they’d ever find that missing boy, Shaun, but he couldn’t answer. The sight of that damn crib haunted him. All he could think about was Duncan and how time was passing and he’d gotten nowhere. He’d just about managed to thickly mutter  _ “yeah, sure”, _ which didn’t sound overly convincing to either of them, before he had to rush outside and try not to be sick. 

Leaning on her doorframe, he peeked round the corner into the room. It was mainly taken up by an old pre-war bed that’d been fixed up like new since the last time they were there. There were clothes, sketchbooks and empty gumdrop wrappers strewn over a dresser in the corner - Codsworth mustn’t be allowed in here, there was no way he’d leave it such a mess. The glow that spilled out into the hallway came from an oil lantern balanced on the windowsill and a single candle, melting its way down on the bedside table. 

On the bed was an open comic and more gumdrops. She hadn’t been sleeping either. 

“If you don’t think you can get caps out of me, you can be damn sure you aren’t getting 210 presents,” he grinned, but Ivy was too busy rummaging through the dresser drawers to do anything more enthusiastic than throw a sock at him. 

He flopped down onto his back on the bed and snatched up the comic and a handful of gumdrop. This bed was a damn sight more comfortable than the crappy mattress he had to put up with, that was for sure. 

_ Grognak the Barbarian and the Jungle of the Bat Babies. _

“Meh. I’ve got this one,” he complained as he munched on the candy, continuing to idly leaf through the pages anyway. 

“Well if you wouldn’t mind  _ not _ losing my page…” Ivy shot him a sharp look over her shoulder as she dragged on a pair of tatter jeans. 

After weeks of sleeping in foxholes, broken-down houses and on rooftops, privacy between the two of them had become less of an issue, he’d gotten fairly used to catching sight of her trying to wriggle in and out of a vault suit in his peripheral vision, but he still couldn’t help smirking at the idea of the raised eyebrows there’d be around the settlement if they could see them now. He had to stop himself chuckling out loud, wondering what Garvey would think of his precious General having an ex-Gunner in her room in the middle of the night. 

Best not to get too smart about the Gunner part… he’d heard about Quincy. Might have been years after his time with them, but that kind of association tainted the way people looked at a man. 

_ Most people anyway _ . 

He glanced over at Ivy who was trying to get her hair to behave.  _ Christ knows why, it’s not like there was anyone to see it. _ It wasn’t Preston’s fault he kept catching on Mac’s last nerve, it was just… there were only so many times you could hear someone called a ‘good man’ without starting to wonder if that made you the ‘bad’ one. Not to mention the looks—he glanced at Ivy again—the way Garvey would go soft whenever she was helping that handyman with settlement stuff, or any other do-gooder crap. You’d think she was some kind of miracle. 

He’d bet every last cap he owned that the man had never seen her pickpocket Gunners or watched those fingers crack a lock faster than any professional he’d ever met, just to break into a guy’s house because he rubbed her up the wrong way. No, MacCready might call her angel, but he was more than aware that she was flesh and blood. 

Ivy plonked herself down cross-legged on the end of the bed, entirely derailing his train of thought. 

“So, a gentleman caller at this late hour… tongues will wag.” She raised an eyebrow. “Did you just come here to frighten me or did you need something?”

Well  _ now _ he felt like an idiot. There was no dodging the question this time, and she was watching him intently. Why was he here? 

_ Because he was lonely?  _ Heck no. _ He couldn’t sleep and he’d gotten used to having someone to talk to?  _ _ He was bored? This place is too damn quiet and too damn boring. And how the hell could she live here before the war? Surrounded by boring houses with boring people and boring jobs and boring  _ everything _ , when she wasn’t boring at all… _

“I saw your light was on.”

“You couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

“Never can on the first night somewhere.” He gave in and shrugged as nonchalantly as he could manage. “Still feels like I need to watch the shadows. Anyway, I gave up trying and figured I’d get some air.” 

She considered his statement for a moment. He hoped she wasn’t considering too hard how much ending up in her house probably didn’t count as ‘getting air’. 

“Air sounds good.”

Well, he couldn’t say he wasn’t a little disappointed at the turn of events. He’d just been getting comfy, wondering if he could sneakily doze off and then she’d be stuck with the couch - she could usually be relied on to be too nice to wake him if she didn’t have to. But he dutifully put aside the well-thumbed comic, grabbed another handful of gumdrops and waited for her to pull on some shoes and grab a spare blanket before they headed outside. 

* * *

Ivy swore under her breath, something about Boston winters even without snow. She gave an exaggerated shiver and dragged the blanket around her shoulders before joining MacCready in the street. She probably should’ve grabbed a coat, MacCready mused, but she didn’t seem bothered enough to head back into the house. Instead she fidgeted on the spot, looking at him expectantly.

“It’s your walk,” she whispered after a moment, keeping her voice low for fear of waking the long since passed out settlers. He could just about see she was smiling at him despite the shadows of the house. “Lead on, boss _. _ ” 

_ Boss _ . He rolled his eyes at her, but led the way anyway, meandering slowly up the street towards the end of the cul-de-sac, their footsteps crunching quietly on the broken asphalt as they passed house after darkened house. 

MacCready stopped when he reached the tree that dominated the end of the estate, not sure where to go next. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. They could wander the edge of the small island that housed the settlement, but that ran the risk of bumping into whoever was on guard and then they’d be stuck making awkward conversation. They could cross the north bridge towards the vault. No, definitely not. Ivy was one of the few people he knew who wanted to go near a vault even less than he did. Especially  _ that _ vault. Anyway, they were meant to be distracting each other from lack of sleep, not creating more reasons for it. 

Ivy must have noticed the lost look on his face (or just got impatient of waiting) because felt a tap on his arm. She didn’t wait for him to respond before dragging him towards the farthest house. Instead of going inside, she led the way to a ladder propped up against the roof.

“You’ve got your binoculars, right?” she whispered, pointing up the ladder. “After you.”

He gave her a confused look, but patted the pair strapped to his belt, and went ahead and climbed first - offering Ivy a hand when she reached the top. Other than a couple of tall trees, the roof offered an unimpeded view right across the commonwealth down to the coast. 

They settled down on the broad roof tiles, feet in the gutter so they didn’t slip down. Ivy had offered to lay the blanket out for them to sit on but after her display outside the house, he wasn’t going to sit there and watch her shiver for the sake of keeping his ass warm. And he told her as much.

“Don’t let anybody tell you I’m not a gentleman,” he grinned after her laughter died down. 

It was a hell of a view. Mac scanned the horizon, picking out the familiar shapes that loomed in the darkness; the jagged skyscrapers of Boston’s skyline - lit up by Diamond City’s unsubtle display of lights, the satellite bank out near the coast, and the freeway, snaking across the landscape towards mass pike interchange. That held his attention a little longer than the rest.  _ Just one more item on his list of problems. _

But Ivy didn’t seem to notice. She wasn’t even looking out across the vista, she was sat back on her elbows, staring straight up into the night sky. 

He leant back too, looking across at her but he didn’t stand a chance of catching her eye, she was completely enthralled. After a couple of minutes he gave up and gently prodded her, “Come back down to earth, spaceman…” It was enough to get her to tear her eyes away from the sky and glance back across at him. A sad smile touched her lips. 

“My dad loved looking at the stars. It was kind of his job... along with a lot of math. He taught at a college back home.” She didn’t often talk about before, and he wasn’t sure she’d ever mentioned her family. “You don’t know how lucky you are, seeing the sky like this. People would travel hundreds of miles for a view like this.”

“Seriously?” MacCready stared up, bemused. 

“Seriously.” She smiled at him, or maybe through him. Her mind seemed to be somewhere else, but not in a bad way for once. “Have you ever tried to look at the stars when you’re in Diamond City? Even Goodneighbor? It’s far too bright, you can barely see anything. That’s what most places were like before the war. It was all streetlights stopping you from seeing ‘ _ one of the best views in the universe’ _ . That’s what my dad used to say, anyway. He used to drive me, my mum and my brother out into the middle of the countryside on clear nights like this. I swear he’d talk about space all night, if mum let him.”

“Sorry, I went a bit off topic…” She let out a small laugh and shook her head. “I think the point I was aiming for was it’s beautiful.”

“I suppose it is.” 

He hazarded a smile in the dark. Starlight suited her. Sat there bathed in the soft glow, wide-eyed and taking everything in as though she was seeing it for the first time, she looked genuinely happy. Completely lost to the world, mind, with no idea of anything else happening around her. 

“I’m probably boring you to death.”

“No. Well maybe a little.” MacCready couldn’t resist a chance to tease. “I read about stars when I was a kid. Big balls of glowing gas, yada yada. You said your dad was an expert, show me something I  _ don’t _ know.”

Ivy sat up, giving him a determined look. _Oh good,_ _challenge accepted_. “Fine. Give me those binoculars.”

He handed them over and watched her tracing the sky above them, leaning back to look further and further north east until she spotted what she wanted. 

“You see that star?” she pointed. “The fuzzy looking one.” 

“They all look fuzzy.”

“No they don’t! Come here.” She shuffled right up next to him, still pointing in the direction she was looking. 

It took about five minutes of manhandling to get him looking in the right direction. He was having too much fun winding her up by purposefully not paying attention, and laughing too hard when she tried to move him by his chin because it tickled. Eventually, and only after she begged, he stopped still long enough for her to get him looking in the right direction - according to her anyway. To him it just looked like any other star.

“Ok, stay still will you?” This time Mac did his best as she squashed right up next to him, and pressed her cheek against his to make sure they were both looking where they should be. She produced the binoculars again, holding them so they had an eyepiece each, and _ finally _ he could see what she was talking about. 

“Right, so it’s a fuzzy star?” he muttered from trying to keep his head still. There’d be hell to pay if he didn’t. 

“Look again. See the ellipse shape?” 

“Yeah, the fuzzy one. What about it?”

“Oh, there might be a couple more than just that one fuzzy little star.” She pulled away and handed him the binoculars, tired, but beaming. “More like a trillion of them, a couple of million light years away. _ That _ is the Andromeda Galaxy.”

“No shit- oop.” 

MacCready clamped a hand across his mouth in a poor attempt to catch the curse that had slipped past his lips. 

“Does that count as something you didn’t know?” Ivy giggled softly, stifling a yawn as she lay back down and pulled the blanket tighter around her. “Damn. I should’ve put some caps on it.”

“Yeah, I’d say it counts,” he grinned. “But trust me, I’ve learned not to make bets against you.”

MacCready lay back, staring at the sky, eyes fixed on that blurry star that turned out to be much more than it appeared. He opened his mouth to quiz Ivy some more, but in the quiet he could hear that her breathing had become soft and even. A glance confirmed it, she was fast asleep. 

“Well, I don’t know how I’m going to get you down off this roof,” he whispered, reaching over to tuck an errant curl back behind her ear. “So it looks like we’re here for the night.”

He settled back again, pulling the brim of his cap down over his eyes before resting his head on his hands. This time sleep found him easily, a smile on his face, thinking of a little boy back home who would love to hear all about the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for taking the time to read my random fluff! 
> 
> I spend too long looking up what you can see from the east coast of the US at that time of year, only to not use half of it XD *sigh* so is life
> 
> In this house we both love and respect Preston Garvey. Mac is just being a self-conscious grump and he will get over it. 
> 
> Songs I was listening to:  
> \- Chasing Stars by Fleurie  
> \- Planets and Stars by Pavvla  
> \- Northern Lights by Woodes 
> 
> If you want to know any more about Ivy, or Mac x Ivy, or just want to say hello, hop on over to my tumblr fallout side blog @third-rail-vip


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